Vivid Visions

Preacher's Chapel Packed With Lively, Colorful Folk Art

August 13, 1989|By MARK ST. JOHN ERICKSON Staff Writer

NEWPORT NEWS — Walking into Anderson Johnson's Faith Mission is like stepping from the world of black-and-white into the land of living color. The paintings nailed across the wall of the building's second-floor porch give you a hint of the experience. So do the columns and railings decorated with primitive images of flowering vines. But nothing - not even Johnson's friendly smile, handshake and words of welcome - really prepares you for what's inside.

Spread out across the walls of this small East End church are more than 400 richly colored, exuberant artworks painted by the preacher's untrained but inspired hand. Portraits. Landscapes. Figures. Birds. Visionary scenes. All mounted edge to edge and extending from floor to ceiling.

At the room's front is a homemade pulpit bearing the face of Christ and two ascending rows of angels. Around it, hanging from the posts and beams, are a couple dozen plastic Clorox bottles spattered with red, white and blue paint. Paper tubes shaped like flowers tumble from their mouths.

Small, double-sided paintings hang by strings from the ceiling, revolving lazily in the draft of an electric fan. They alternate with whirling vertical labels that read "Love-Joy, Love-Joy, Love-Joy" as they bobble and spin in the breeze.

"It's my life," Johnson quietly, smiling and waving his arm at the artwork crowded around the room. "If you take that away from me, I'd die.

"I'm a creator. I likes to take nothing and make something of it. That's the way of the Lord."

JOHNSON WAS BORN in rural Lunenberg County nearly three-quarters of a century ago. His family was poor, and he had only a few months of formal schooling. But a strange and moving experience mapped out his life when he was 8 years old.

The boy was hoeing weeds in a cornfield when, as he says, everything around him seemed to turn black. A pair of beautiful angels appeared, peering down at the dumbstruck child over the edge of a huge leatherbound book.

The volume was so big it took both of the creatures to hold it open. The boy couldn't tell for sure if the hovering spirits were women or men. "They told me, `You have nothing in this book against you,'" Johnson says. "And then they was gone."

The youngster didn't know if his encounter was real or merely hallucination. He was bewildered until that evening, when the figure of Christ appeared in a dream and told him to go out and preach. "When I first started, people thought I was crazy," he says. "But after a while they become convinced I had had a vision. That's when they started to listen."

Johnson's family later moved to Newport News. He continued to preach there, giving friendly sermons to the downtown storekeepers and professional men while he shined their shoes.

He left home at 16 to become pastor of a small congregation in Vineland, N.J. It met every Sunday in a dance hall rented out for $4. His next church was in Sharon Hill, Penn., and had only three or four members. Sometimes there wasn't much for the aspiring young preacher to do.

That's when he began honing his skills at the guitar and piano. And that's when he rediscovered his childhood interest in drawing. "Sometimes I'd sit up all night and draw," he says. "But I didn't have any training. The drawing just came from inside me. I'd just look at a thing and draw it."

Not quite 20, Johnson's faith and musical skills became the backbone of a long nomadic career spent in small, mostly poor churches and on fervent street-corner preaching. He lived in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, Tampa and Los Angeles over the years, taking his message to the pavement when he couldn't find a congregation.

He washed dishes, cut fruit, detailed cars, baled wool, scoured barrels, lugged baggage and emptied bedpans, among other things, to help pay for his mission. He also sold off a steady stream of simple pastel drawings. "Sometimes I'd sell them for 10 cents. Sometimes 10 for a dollar," he says. "I'd get a roll of wallpaper and turn it over and draw on the back. I can do that real fast - sketching."

JOHNSON'S LIFE DIDN'T change much until 18 years ago, when he was stricken with a degenerative illness. The affliction eventually forced him to move back east to Newport News. In 1984, he entered Riverside Hospital suffering from partial paralysis of an arm and a leg. The doctors there, he says, wanted to amputate. But the preacher refused.

He still was forced to use a wheelchair when he returned to the two-story family home on Ivy Avenue in 1985. Then, apparently without explanation, he began to get better. "I could slide down the steps," he says. "But I couldn't walk down. I couldn't go anywhere without crutches. But eventually, with God's help, I could walk again."

Johnson's recovery, though only partial, led him to turn the first floor of his house into the Faith Mission. He also opened an adjacent home to several needy members of the church's small congregation. The neighborhood folks call it Saints' Nest.